Featured Social Media Tool : Thoughtbuzz

About the tool!

ThoughtBuzz is a powerful and feature-rich 24/7 real-time application for tracking and analysing public conversations across a plethora of social media platforms, in an easy-to-use customisable format.

With the phenomenal growth of social media, online public contents are becoming fundamental to media intelligence. ThoughtBuzz helps companies and individuals in discovering trends about their brands and their competitors in the industry. Through skilfully-formulated algorithms and software engineering, it can analyse social media conversations in multiple ways: assigning of sentiments, identification of topics, demographics of users, to name a few. Coupled with analyst support, ThoughtBuzz has the capacity to process large information quickly and customise data via reports.

Who founded the product/company?

Singapore-based ThoughtBuzz was conceived in February 2009 by guys about to finish their MBA’s – all with IT experience and with ages ranging from 25 to 29. Originally, their aim was just to provide users with a way to manage their profiles on multiple social networks. However, Founder Anshul Jain and his partner Ashok Patro soon realised that such tools were already available and many were actually doing good. They then decided to shift focus to social media measurement when during their research, they came across how increasingly important social media is to brands and companies.

What platforms does it cover?

ThoughtBuzz tracks blogs, forums, news, microblogs, review sites such as Amazon and CNET, Q&A sites such as Yahoo Q&A, social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Identica, as well as country-specific social networks such as Ning and RenRen. The system currently tracks more than 130 million blogs and 70 million forums globally. The application also supports custom sources by adding user-defined sources to its indexing database.

Features of the tool?

ThoughtBuzz has its own crawlers for data extraction. As it does not solely depend on third party API feeds for data collection, the application provides faster and more relevant results. It can also segregate information country-wise to provide social media analytics for different markets. This classification is based on context, making it more accurate than other tools that use IP address for classification.

The company is also focused on providing local support in the countries where it is present. With strong presence in the APAC region, ThoughtBuzz processes and understands multi-lingual content. It provides social media analytics for English, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia etc.

What analytics support does the tool provide?

ThoughtBuzz provides various levels of analysis.

Sentiment Analysis categorises posts as positive, negative or neutral. This is done by a proprietary NLP (Natural Language Processor). The system calculates the sentiment of the overall article along with the sentiment related to different topics discussed.

Users can make more in-depth sense of the data through Topics Analysis. Going beyond just recognising words, the system identifies the context of discussion, as well as the overall sentiment towards those topics.

With Demographics Analysis, the author’s age, education level, and gender are calculated based on the linguistic analysis, names and other related hints along with the profile of the author (if available).

Does it give an option to download reports

ThoughtBuzz lets users generate and download reports from the data collected and analysed. Reports can easily be generated into PDF files by dragging the charts into the “Report” box.

With the intervention of ThoughtBuzz’s Social Media Analysts, custom reports can be prepared. The customer reports are client specific and allows you to capture brand buzz & competition buzz. These reports are comprehensive & can be delivered on frequency as desired by the client. These reports cater to the brands needs where no automated tool can do justice and requires a deeper understanding of human conversations using human intelligence.

What kind of sentiment analysis does it do and how accurate is it?

Sentiments are determined based on words, phrases and symbols used in text. The system first checks for words and classifies them into positive, negative and neutral categories. The next step involves checking the phrases in which these words are present. Based on the classification of the words, the phrase is assigned a sentiment. Symbols such as (?), (!) are also taken into consideration when identifying the tone of the entire sentence. The system also looks for pronouns, adverbs or adjectives present in text to identify sentiments.

Users also have the option to change the sentiments that the system automatically assigned. In such a scenario, the system learns that the sentiment has changed and in the future, if an article has similar words, expression and structure, the system would mark the sentiment as assigned by the user.

What’s the algorithm for sentiment analysis

As described above, sentiment analysis takes into accounts multiple factors for determining sentiment. The algorithm uses mathematical functions such as probability to determine sentiment. The sentiment algorithm as Artificial Intelligence. The algorithm allows a user to change sentiment while the system learns from the change. This enables increased accuracy as the user uses the system.

What are the brands/agencies that are using this tool?

ThoughtBuzz is a tool that proves to be useful in various types of organisations: SMEs and MNCs can proactively dialogue with consumers while discussing their brand and effectively managing their online reputation; Marketing Professionals can test marketing engagements and receive timely feedback on new products and services; Customer-oriented companies can zero-in on negative feedback and address it to stop a snowball effect.

ThoughtBuzz’s client base is comprised of – to name a few – Advertising and PR Agencies such as Ogilvy, JWT, The Hoffman Agency, Weber Shandwick; Government Units such as Singapore’s PUB, Ministry of Transport; and other well-known brands such as Canon, Toyota, Johnson&Johnson, Heineken etc.

Pricing & Packages

ThoughtBuzz offers flexible pricing models which suit the client requirement ranging from volume based to profile based pricing.

RoadMap

Companies and brands are increasingly seeing the need to connect their social media efforts to business goals, to actual ROI. To do that, social media monitoring and analysis will play a crucial role in their strategies and efforts. As they are moving from just monitoring to engagement and gradually taking social media initiatives seriously, ThoughtBuzz is gearing up to provide more new products and services to address their needs.

Executive Director
• Tracy has a B.Sc. in Economics and Computer Science from NUS.
• Has close to 12 years of experience as a market researcher and strategic consultant across diverse industries.
• She has advised numerous local and international companies including Microsoft, Honda, Phillips and Singtel

CEO & Founder
• Anshul has a B.Sc. (Honours) from Singapore Management University and MBA from SP Jain Centre of Management.
• Previously with Oracle where he managed clients including Barclays, Citigroup and HSBC.
• More than 5 years of experience in social media and has led various discussions on web 2.0 and appeared on Channel News Asia
• Recently was invited on a panel at Social Media World Forum

COO & Co-Founder
• Ashok holds a B.E. and MBA from SP Jain Centre of Management.
• Has extensive experience in the mobile wireless industry and has worked for clients such as Samsung and Qualcomm
• Has more than 6 years of experience in handling cross-cultural teams, attaining high performance targets and product development